Mood Detection in Ambiguous Messages: The Interaction Between Text and Emoticons

Association Strategies of Speech Behavior of Communicators in Coding Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Approach Towards Understanding the Role of Cognitive and Linguistic Processes in Communication

In modern media, the names of fairy-tale and mythological images are used to convey certain emotions and connotations. The aim of the study is to analyze the characteristic associative strategies presented with the mythological images of a dragon, a paper tiger and a chimera in news texts of European and Chinese mass media. In this article, the method of text analysis was used to identify patterns and the most possible interpretations of lexical units. 100 articles from Chinese and European publications were selected for the analysis (About People's Daily Online, China News Service, Guardian and France 24). The required lexemes were most widely used in articles on political topics. The most used was the image of a paper tiger (4001 and 3587 units). This is due to its well-known metaphorical meaning in both cultures, while dragon differs in Chinese and European ones. Further research may focus on the search and analysis of other fairy tale and mythological images in mass media. The present study results may also be applied for further research in the field of linguistics and journalism.

A study of dynamic emoji emotional responses based on rhythms and motion effects

Dynamic emojis are a form of nonverbal communication used in social programs to express emotions during conversations. Studies have shown that different dynamic effects can influence users' emotional perceptions. Previous studies have focused on the emotional responses elicited by static emojis, while the emotional responses to dynamic emojis have not been thoroughly explored. In this study, we examined the impact of 128 different dynamic effects, categorized into emotional types (HAHV, LAHV, HALV, and LALV), on users' arousal and valence, and conducted semi-structured interviews to identify users' preferred dynamic effects. The results revealed significant and positive correlations between the arousal levels of all dynamic emojis and the effects of rhythms. However, the impact of rhythms on the valence of dynamic emojis varied depending on the emotion types of emojis. Specifically, the effects of motion on the valence of dynamic high-valence emojis were found to be significant, whereas they were not significant for dynamic low-valence emojis. Based on these findings, we recommend considering following factors in the design of dynamic emojis, including rhythms, motion effects, motion range, emotional metaphors, and the creation of contrast.

Mood detection and prediction using conventional machine learning techniques on COVID19 data

Emotion detection is a promising field of research in multiple perspectives such as psychology, marketing, network analysis and so on. Multiple models have been suggested over the years for accurate and efficient mood detection. Identifying emotion, or mood, from text has progressed from a simple frequency distribution analysis to far more complicated learning approaches. The main aim of all these text mining and analysis is twofold. First is to categorise existing text into broad classes of emotions, such as happy, sad, angry, surprised and so on. The second aim is to accurately predict the moods of real-time streaming text. The novelty of the work lies in the extensive comparison of nine conventional learning methods with respect to performance metrics precision, recall, F1 and accuracy as well as studying the variance of mood over time using a wide array of moods (25). Using conventional classifiers allow near real-time predictions, can work on considerably less training data, and has the flexibility of feature engineering, as deep learning methods have feature engineering embedded in the model. Since a single line of text can be associated with multiple emotions, this article compares the performance of classifiers in predicting multiple moods for streaming text with likelihood-based ranking. An android application named Citizens’ Sense was developed for text collection and analysis. The performance of mood classifiers are tested further using Twitter data related to COVID19. Based on the precision, recall, F1 and accuracy of the classifiers, it can be seen that Random Forest, Decision Tree and Complement Naive Bayes classifiers are marginally better than the other classifiers. The variance of mood over time, and predicted moods for text support this finding.

Emotions and virality: Social transmission of political messages on Twitter

Drawing on previous literature that valence and arousal constitute the fundamental properties of emotions and that emotional content is a determinant of social transmission, this study examines the role of valence and arousal in the social transmission of politicians' messages on Twitter. For over 3,000 tweets from five Austrian party leaders, the discrete emotion that the message intended to elicit in its recipients was captured by human coders and then classified on its valence (positive or negative) and arousal (low or high). We examined the effects of valence and arousal on the retweet probability of messages. Results indicate that tweets eliciting a negative (vs. positive) valence decreased retweet probability, whereas tweets eliciting a high (vs. low) arousal increased retweet probability. The present research replicates previous findings that arousal constitutes a determinant of social transmission but extends this mechanism to the realm of political communication on Twitter. Moreover, in contrast to the frequently mentioned negativity bias, positive emotions increased the likelihood of a message being shared in this study.

Play the Pain: A Digital Strategy for Play-Oriented Research and Action

The value of understanding patients' illness experience and social contexts for advancing medicine and clinical care is widely acknowledged. However, methodologies for rigorous and inclusive data gathering and integrative analysis of biomedical, cultural, and social factors are limited. In this paper, we propose a digital strategy for large-scale qualitative health research, using play (as a state of being, a communication mode or context, and a set of imaginative, expressive, and game-like activities) as a research method for recursive learning and action planning. Our proposal builds on Gregory Bateson's cybernetic approach to knowledge production. Using chronic pain as an example, we show how pragmatic, structural and cultural constraints that define the relationship of patients to the healthcare system can give rise to conflicted messaging that impedes inclusive health research. We then review existing literature to illustrate how different types of play including games, chatbots, virtual worlds, and creative art making can contribute to research in chronic pain. Inspired by Frederick Steier's application of Bateson's theory to designing a science museum, we propose DiSPORA (Digital Strategy for Play-Oriented Research and Action), a virtual citizen science laboratory which provides a framework for delivering health information, tools for play-based experimentation, and data collection capacity, but is flexible in allowing participants to choose the mode and the extent of their interaction. Combined with other data management platforms used in epidemiological studies of neuropsychiatric illness, DiSPORA offers a tool for large-scale qualitative research, digital phenotyping, and advancing personalized medicine.

Disgusting Face, Disease-Ridden Place?: Emoji Influence on the Interpretation of Restaurant Inspection Reports

Every year, millions of Americans get sick from foodborne illness and it is estimated half of all reported instances occur at restaurants. To protect the public, regulators are encouraged to conduct restaurant inspections and disclose reports to consumers. However, inspection reporting format is inconsistent and typically contains information unclear to most consumers who often misinterpret the inspection results. Additionally, consumers are increasingly searching for this information in a digital context. Limited research explores inspection reports as communication tools. Using affect-as-information and ELM as theoretical frameworks, this experiment investigated how discrete emotions (e.g., disgust) conveyed through pictorial cues (i.e., emojis) influenced consumers' processing of inspection reports. Participants, recruited from Amazon's MTurk, were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions in a 3 (emoji: smiling vs. disgusted vs. none) x 2 (violation level: low vs. high) between-subjects design. Then, participants completed a questionnaire regarding perceptions and cognitive processing of the message. Results revealed that, compared to text, disgusted face emoji increased risk perceptions and avoidance behavior. In terms of emotion, smiling face emoji motivated participants to feel more emotions related to sanitation. In turn, positive feelings decreased elaboration likelihood. As predicted by ELM, involvement also predicted elaboration, such that participants who were highly involved with inspection reports elaborated more than those less involved. Involvement also moderated the relationship between emoji presented and elaboration. Practical implications are also discussed.

Emoji as Affective Symbols: Affective Judgments of Emoji, Emoticons, and Human Faces Varying in Emotional Content

An important function of emoji as communicative symbols is to convey emotional content from sender to receiver in computer-mediated communication, e. g., WhatsApp. However, compared with real faces, pictures or words, many emoji are ambiguous because they do not symbolize a discrete emotion or feeling state. Thus, their meaning relies on the context of the message in which they are embedded. Previous studies investigated affective judgments of pictures, faces, and words suggesting that these stimuli show a typical distribution along the big two emotion dimensions of valence and arousal. Also, emoji and emoticons have been investigated recently for their affective significance. The present study extends previous research by investigating affective ratings of emoji, emoticons and human faces and by direct comparison between them. In total, 60 stimuli have been rated by 83 participants (eight males, age: 18–49 years), using the non-verbal Self-Assessment Manikin Scales for valence and arousal. The emotionality of the stimuli was measured on a 9-point Likert scale. The results show significant main effects of the factors “stimulus category” and “discrete emotion” including emotionality, valence and arousal. Also, the interaction between these two main factors was significant. Emoji elicited highest arousal, whereas stimuli related to happiness were rated highest in valence across stimulus categories. Angry emoji were rated highest in emotionality. Also, the discrete emotion was best recognized in emoji, followed by human face stimuli and lastly emoticons.

Increase in Beta Power Reflects Attentional Top-Down Modulation After Psychosocial Stress Induction

Selective attention depends on goal-directed and stimulus-driven modulatory factors, each relayed by different brain rhythms. Under certain circumstances, stress-related states can change the balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this study, we explored how psychosocial stress can modulate brain rhythms during an attentional task and a task-free period. We recorded the EEG and ECG activity of 42 healthy participants subjected to either the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), a controlled procedure to induce stress, or a comparable control protocol (same physical and cognitive effort but without the stress component), flanked by an attentional task, a 90 s of task-free period and a state of anxiety questionnaire. We observed that psychosocial stress induced an increase in heart rate (HR), self-reported anxiety, and alpha power synchronization. Also, psychosocial stress evoked a relative beta power increase during correct trials of the attentional task, which correlates positively with anxiety and heart rate increase, and inversely with attentional accuracy. These results suggest that psychosocial stress affects performance by redirecting attentional resources toward internal threat-related thoughts. An increment of endogenous top-down modulation reflected an increased beta-band activity that may serve as a compensatory mechanism to redirect attentional resources toward the ongoing task. The data obtained here may contribute to designing new ways of clinical management of the human stress response in the future and could help to minimize the damaging effects of persistent stressful experiences.

Emoji can facilitate recognition of conveyed indirect meaning

In face-to-face communication there are multiple paralinguistic and gestural features that facilitate recognition of a speaker’s intended meaning, features that are lacking when people communicate digitally (e.g., texting). As a result, substitutes have emerged (expressive punctuation, capitalization, etc.) to facilitate communication in these situations. However, little is known about the comprehension processes involved in digital communication. In this research we examined the role of emoji in the comprehension of face-threatening, indirect replies. Participants in two experiments read question–reply sequences and then judged the accuracy of interpretations of the replies. On critical trials the reply violated the relation maxim and conveyed a negative, face-threatening response. On one-third of the trials the reply contained only text, on one-third of the trials the reply contained text and an emoji, and on one-third of the trials the reply contained only an emoji. When the question requested potentially negative information about one of the interactants (disclosures and opinions), participants were more likely to endorse the indirect meaning of the reply, and did so faster, when the reply contained an emoji than when it did not. This effect did not occur when the question was a request for action, a more conventional type of indirect reply. Overall, then, this research demonstrates that emoji can sometimes facilitate the comprehension of meaning. Future research is needed to examine the boundary conditions for this effect.

Emojis in public health and how they might be used for hand hygiene and infection prevention and control

Emojis are frequently used picture characters known as possible surrogates for non-verbal aspects of behavior. Considering the ability of emojis to enhance and facilitate communication, there has been a growing interest in studying their effects in scientific and health-related topics over the past few years. Infection prevention and control (IPC) is a field of medicine that is directly associated with specific behaviors. These include hand hygiene, which is the cornerstone of the prevention of healthcare-associated infections, and essential in stemming the spread of antimicrobial resistance. This paper aims to provide an overview of how emojis have been used in the medical and public health literature and proposes their possible use in IPC and hand hygiene to put forth a vision for the future research.

The Effect of High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus on Empathy in Healthy Individuals

Empathy, including cognitive and emotional empathy, refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others and to the capacity to share emotions. The neural mechanisms involved in empathy are complex and not yet fully understood, and previous studies have shown that both cognitive and emotional empathy are closely associated with the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In this study, we examined whether empathy can be modulated by high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) of the right IFG. Twenty-three healthy participants took part in all three experimental conditions (i.e., anodal, cathodal and sham stimulation) in a randomized order. Participants then completed the Chinese version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET), which assesses both cognitive and emotional empathy. The results show that scores obtained for cognitive empathy following cathodal stimulation are significantly lower than those obtained following sham stimulation. In addition, scores obtained for cognitive empathy following anodal stimulation are higher than those obtained following sham stimulation, though the difference is only marginally significant. However, the results fail to show whether the stimulation of the right IFG via HD-tDCS plays a role in emotional empathy. Our results suggest that the right IFG plays a key role in cognitive empathy and indicate that HD-tDCS can regulate cognitive empathy by inducing excitability changes in the right IFG.